“Survival Skills for Developers”

ardent dev - Survival Skills for Developers

“Let’s suspend reality for a moment and pretend you’re heading out into the woods this weekend. Set aside the fact that you are a software developer and have no business tromping around out in the wilderness.  You’re going to want to take along a few basics:  maybe some matches, a tent or shelter of some sort, a bit of food, and some dry clothes.  To survive you need the right tools / supplies and the skills to use them.

(I bet you see where I’m going with this.)

Back at the office, where your mouse and keyboard fret over your safe return, there awaits an entirely different survival scenario:

Survivor: Cubicle.  Outcode.  Outbuild.  Outlast.

Surviving as a software developer is more than stringing together some lines of code that read and write from a database.  Sure, those are basic skills.  To survive in the woods you obviously need to walk and breathe, but you also need to start a fire and build a shelter.

The following 8 items form a basic survival pack that can get you through most modern software development forests:

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Some interesting thoughts on eight technical skills a software developer needs to “survive.”

Besides technical skills though I think I’d add soft skills;

• Working well with others
• Learning to estimate
• Learning to manage your time
• Juggling multiple “high priority” items at once
• Managing your manager/customers/users
• Learning to say No (in a nice, professional way)
• Learning to say Yes (there are times when a No should really be a Yes)
• Learning the delivering is a feature all in of itself

Without soft skills you might be able to “survive” in the summer, but when the cold winter winds blow and “they” are looking for someone to put into the put for dinner…